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Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

arstechnica.com

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Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to meet any Christians who don't contradict other Christians, while being 100% convinced their personal beliefs are correct and all those other interpretations are wrong. So I don't think No True Christian is relevant here. Whatever religion the CEO was cosplaying, the bottom line is that she was involved in organising an aggressive criminal cover-up which caused multiple suicides, unlawful jail terms, and b…

> I've yet to meet any Christians who don't contradict other Christians, while being 100% convinced their personal beliefs are correct and all those other interpretations are wrong. Christian means "Christ-like", it's not surprising that different people have different interpretations of what that means. But my experience has been the stronger someone proclaims their christianity, the less trustworthy they are in gen…

> it's not surprising that different people have different interpretations of what that means.

Perhaps that's not surprising, but it's certainly "un-Christ-like" to be so arrogant to think your interpretations are right and everyone else is doing it wrong.

Of course, most organized religion has at least some focus on telling people outside their religion that they're doing it wrong, so this attitude among religious people shouldn't be surprising, either.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#152
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horizons was based on a failed benefits system and it was widely known that the quality of the software team was not good. IIRC it didn't even use ACID transactions, so glitches and power outages could cause big problems. What sort of company would put their Z team on a multi-billion pound contract?

Every company that wants to succeed in the bodyshop world. Government contracting is broken in the Anglosphere. Parties contracting out software tend to do it because they cannot manage the project themselves, but they can pay a lot of attention to the financials. So you need to cut costs and just meet the delivery bar that the customer tests for, not actually exceed expectations. You're not going to get credit for t…

Government procurement trends towards broken in most countries.

You start out with a nice and clean set of rules, easy to validate. Stuff like "make sure the c-suite aren't relatives of the government officials making the decision".

Time goes by, something goes wrong. Press has a field day. Politicians get embarrassed and add a rule to ensure they can't be embarrassed that way again.

For example, maybe the company chosen was in a dire financial situation, and goes bankrupt, leaving the government up the creek without a paddle. The politicians get embarrassed and add a rule to the procurement process that requires the company getting the contract must demonstrate that they are a going concern.

Over time, what started as a neat and clean system, ends up with the most convoluted and complicated sets of checks and balances known to man. Purchasing decisions that used to take a week, now take 6 months+, and require a significant outlay from the companies that are in the running.

What you end up with is that very few companies can actually compete in the space, few of them have the financial resources to be able to make the kinds of outlay involved, nor take that kind of bet.

The companies that remain in the field are those with the most skill at navigating through the ever changing government procurement processes, and deliver just enough of a solution to satisfy the government, without causing drama.

You can practically guarantee this Fujitsu drama is going to cause yet more rules to be added to the procurement process, because politicians won't want to be embarrassed this way again.

This is almost identical to the way a lot of software development works. So much organic growth. Something that started out completely sane, becomes a near impenetrable mess that practically guarantees bugs. We find edge cases and we fix them. We need to add extra functionality, so we just find a place that looks reasonably logical for it to go. Over and over, until "Wait, what....?" becomes the background sound of the office.

At least in software, we can more easily reach a consensus that it's time to refactor, or completely gut and replace what has gone before. It often hurts us to a sufficient degree that we're motivated to do so.

With governments, all the incentives are missing on the very people that need to be incentivised for it to be fixed. They don't want to have their name against a big re-do of the procurement process, and have it drop something that would have stopped the next disaster. Those are the kinds of things that opponents in an election will jump all over and tout as an example of why you're unfit to serve.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "In 2013, Vennells hired forensic accounting firm Second Sight, headed up by Ron Warmington, to investigate the Horizon software losses. Warmington discovered the system was flawed and faulty, but Vennells was unhappy with Warmington's report and terminated their contract." Inexcusable.

Yes totally but shouldn’t it have been the prosecution that hired forensic accountants in order to, well, prosecute

In the UK, private parties can prosecute people. The Post office was doing this. As a citizen of the USA, this is a completely alien concept to me. How can a corporation put a person in prison?

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So you really should expect true Christians, on average, to gradually become better people. Only if I accept their beliefs as accurate.

You shouldn’t have to accept the beliefs, just the virtues, if it’s a religion with a stated goal of making people virtuous (excluding some polytheistic faiths, for instance).

The poster upthread said that the mechanism for becoming better people was that the Holy Spirit makes it so. If the Holy Spirit doesn't exist, then the only mechanism for self-improvement is one's own ability to make those improvements, consciously.

Virtues alone don't make people better. Doing the hard work to introspect and actually make yourself better... that's what makes you better.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#155

I think it was more than 'bugs'. The whole architectural design was inadequate. See Computerphile video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBJm9ZYqL10 (C++ programmer, but not an expert of distributed systems - would be interested to hear from someone that is)

Reconciling and accounting isn't difficult. Is the intent accuracy? Was money a motive? I don't know the full story but cooking the books is how you skim. And once you're dirty, in order to come clean you need to expose everything.

The intent was to keep their chummy contract with government going and keep riding the gravy train, no matter how shit the software was.

So far, I haven't seen evidence of anyone at Fujitsu inserting fake records in order to enrich the company - FYI the contract was such that the government took basically no risk, Fujitsu fronted the money to pay for Horizon's development, and in return Fujitsu gets a cut of all transactions. All they need to do is keep the sweet deal going.

What I have seen evidence of is them clearly detecting bugs, and inserting fake records to make the numbers reconcile, but still being so thick that their support staff didn't notice the fake numbers didn't add up either.

https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html

Their motive appears to keep the corporate gravy train going, so yes it's personal enrichment, and to fudge the numbers on the sly so nobody questions Fujitsu's competence to run their system... but not cook the books directly.

Then of course the Post Office would prosecute the SPMs for discrepencies hallucinated by Fujitsu's broken accounting software, and not be curious or ask questions of Fujitsu, because then the Post Office bosses wouldn't get their performance-based bonuses.

There's also straight up incompetence:

https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/ecce-chambers/

> Chambers admitted to the Inquiry that despite being told the discrepancies had occurred on various occasions at the branch throughout the year, she only looked at the system information behind the most recent discrepancy. She also didn’t check to see if something similar had been reported by any other branch. Her “investigation”, from assignation to conclusion, took one hour sixteen minutes.

> Chambers conceded that she didn’t know if it was an unknown system error was affecting the branch, and seemed to accept that her stark conclusion in 2013: “No fault in product” and “user” error, was misleading. She added:

> “I don’t think I handled it terribly well. I was frustrated by it and I think that shows… because, you know, it really looked like there was a genuine problem… [but]… There was no sign of it.”

> In summary, ten years ago, Anne Chambers appears not to have considered the possibility of unknown system problems, or prompted an investigation more advanced than what she could achieve within the limits of her knowledge and ability. Instead, after a quick squizz at a limited dataset she concluded there was no obvious problem, which meant there was no problem and the cause of the discrepancy was the Subpostmaster.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#156
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related, started realizing that "being a principled person" doesn't really mean "having (stated) principles", it means belief that you can (and should ) have principles that you're trying to apply consistently and continuously. Lots of people have principles. Not so many people are principled.

Perhaps, but if they're unstated, what prevents you revising your principles after the fact, to fit your actions? Anyway the UK Fujitsu/Postmaster scandal is about a huge chain of dishonest human behavior, not bugs in software.

Being principled would preclude you from changing those principles to excuse your own bad behavior.

Put another way, if you were to do this, then you weren't really principled in the first place, were you?

And it's not like people don't say out loud that they are a certain way, and then act against that. There's no magic in principles being explicitly stated.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#158

How material were the post offices “overbooking” of profits by false sales registered via this bug ? How plausible is it that in-fact the internal narrative was that the post office was wildly more profitable than it was, but that they just need to crack down on this minor theft problem that they have via prosecutions while at the same time padding their figures a bit via postmasters money ?

It's worse than that. Post Office investigators got performance-related bonuses for every successful prosecution. They were chomping at the bit to prosecute anyone who showed the slightest discrepancy, and all their Christmases came at once after Horizon was installed.

Moral hazard, cobra effect, if all you have is a hammer, etc.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/10/post-office-exec...

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#159

Bugs are inevitable. The real issue is with the post office management that prosecuted people they knew there was a good chance were innocent, withheld evidence, falsified evidence, and harassed journalists investigating. What really bothers me is that the CEO of the Organisation at the time was also a Christian priest/deacon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells > witness statements from Fujitsu staff due to…

> What really bothers me is that the CEO of the Organisation at the time was also a Christian priest/deacon At the risk of making a No True Scotsman argument, it's anyone's guess as to whether or not she truly is a Christian. The only conclusion I can really draw from this is that she apparently acted in a way that's not consistent with Christian ideals.

The main conclusion I draw from this is that people will generally do whatever they want or feel they need to do, and their religious beliefs or affiliations continue to not really matter all that much.

> she apparently acted in a way that's not consistent with Christian ideals

Considering that "Christian ideals", depending on whom you ask, can include some pretty bad things, I don't think this matters all that much.

Re: Fujitsu bugs that sent innocent people to prison were known "from the start"

#160

this is crazy cant help but consider that fujitsu is an SI that competes with infosys and this really undermines fujitsu in the minds of british tac payers...

The UK government took Fujitsu off their "preferred vendors" list. But they're not allowed, by law, to exclude a company completely from new contracts.

They tried to cancel another Fujitsu contract, but Fujitsu took them to court and won, so the government have to keep accepting their shit service.

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